In any business, keeping customers satisfied is critical. Many techniques have been used to determine the level of customer satisfaction. One technique provides for analyzing sales histories and related product matrices. However, only limited information is typically gathered from sales histories. For example, while analyzing sales history for a particular product or group of products may provide information about which products are beginning to weaken in sales, little if any information is provided about why particular products are slowing in sales. Furthermore, although sales history may provide information about regional buying trends, it usually can not indicate why a particular customer was dissatisfied.
Another problem with using sales history data to track customer satisfaction is that the data is usually several weeks or months old by the time an analyzer compiles sales information and reviews the results. By this time, even if a problem can be identified, it is often too late to make a difference in the product's life cycle.
Another technique to determine customer satisfaction is through direct contact with the customer. This can be done either passively or proactively. In the passive approach, complaints received from customers are indexed and stored for reporting and analysis at a later time. In the proactive approach, customer surveys are issued or data is manually collected and subsequently entered into a Customer Relationship Management system. Then either the Customer Relationship Management system or a user of the system can identify issues and proactively schedules customer contact to resolve a particular identified issue. A disadvantage of this approach is that collecting information from customers, either passively or proactively, is a manual, labor-consuming and relatively expensive process.
Getting customer response through the use of generic surveys also has several disadvantages. First, surveys tend to be impersonal and ask general questions such as “How was your meal?” or “Would you shop here again?” that are not unique to a particular customer's experience. Second, surveys are often unnecessarily cumbersome to complete. For example, a survey may ask for the product name, identifier (ID), serial number, store purchased from, purchase price, purchase date, and a host of other questions unrelated to a particular customer's feedback. While the answers to these questions may be important to determine which product or service the customer is commenting on, a customer looking over this type of survey often determines that too much work must be done that is unrelated to their particular transaction and foregoes answering any of the questions in the survey.
A third problem is that surveys are typically filled out by customers some period of time after their purchases. Also, for proactively sent surveys, the periods of time between the actual purchases and the completion of the surveys are great enough to make it difficult for customers to accurately remember the details of their particular purchases. The fourth and perhaps the most significant disadvantage of surveys in the past is that customers often felt that their responses had little or no effect. For these and other reasons, customers often do not respond to surveys, and when they do, the surveys often contain inaccurate and stale data.
Yet another approach for determining customer satisfaction is through the use of Loyalty Cards that contain a customer ID which is used to track a customer's purchases. While this approach associates customer purchases with particular customers, it does not indicate why a particular customer has changed purchasing behavior.
One option for generating surveys is that of offering promotional items or services as a reward to the survey taker. However, this approach does not always work as the item or service being offered as a reward may not be to the liking of the survey taker. In fact, there is no guarantee that the survey taker may even be inclined to accept the promotional offer. This, thereby, negates the incentive offered by the promotional item or service.